1. Technical Field
Generally, the present invention relates to an analytical method and system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and system for evaluating and measuring a website's overall quality and ability to generate revenue, comparing the website with other websites, reporting the system's results to the user, suggesting modifications to be made to the website, and implementing improvements in the website.
2. Background Art
In the late 1990s, the Internet generated a great deal of enthusiasm and businesses overrated its ability to change the world. In 2001, the Internet “bubble” burst, the stock market crashed, and the Internet's utility as a business tool was called into question.
By 2004, with the success of Google and its IPO, companies began to better appreciate the power of the Internet, and increasingly began to use the web as an advertising medium. Over the last few years, the Internet has also played an increasing significant role in the lives of average consumers. For example, the average person spends a few hours of each workday tending to e-mails, and over 50% of all households with Internet connections have purchased products online over the past year.
Although the Internet currently accounts for only 4.3% of all media spending (TV and magazines account for most of the rest), the web occupies 14% of all consumers' media exposure time, indicating a huge opportunity for online marketers to fill, in terms of web related advertising.
Nowadays, almost all companies have websites. Most company websites provide extensive product “information” and often contain brand building and customer service features (e.g., how to contact us, free recipes, etc.). But, with the exception of a few websites who effectively market themselves via the web (e.g., Amazon, EBay, travel sites like Orbitz), only a very small percentage of websites actually generate substantive new revenues for their owners, and after taking the cost of web operations into account, even fewer websites are actually profitable. In fact, most websites actually lose money.
Most companies have invested significant resources to create, update and maintain their websites. Yet, instead of driving incremental (new) revenue to the business and delivering a measurable “return on their investment”, websites have been reduced to a new “cost of doing business” for many companies.
Since the return on investment for websites is often negative, and companies cannot pinpoint the reasons for this profit loss, they are generally reluctant to further invest in improving their websites, adding more features, and increasing advertising. Furthermore, this trend is perpetuated by the absence of basic analytical tools for measuring the quality and effectiveness of a company's website and for identifying specific areas in need of modification or improvement. It would therefore be useful to develop a methodology for analyzing the effectiveness of a website from a revenue generating perspective, and for identifying and implementing changes to areas in need of improvement.
The basic question therefore becomes: How can companies learn enough to help increase their website's profitability?
If companies could clearly dissect all of the business elements of their websites, and measure the potency and effectiveness of each one of those drivers (especially those which drive new and incremental business), the company could then take steps to optimize those specific elements to create new revenue streams and increase the website's profitability.
There are companies such as ForSee Research and Keynote who speak to large groups of consumers about their experiences with a website. They then report on the level of overall “customer satisfaction” with that website as well as likes and dislikes. While these companies are able to analyze certain website features, each of these firms generally only measure 10-20% of the elements that make a corporate or branded website effective (i.e., customer satisfaction), comprehensive, and fully profitable. In other words, there are no analytic tools that measure a website's OVERALL ability to generate revenue. Additionally, these services are often only available to large companies who can invest in such consultants and surveys. Smaller, emerging companies, who often turn to the Internet as a cost effective method for doing business, generally cannot afford these often-expensive consultants.
Furthermore, some companies use a website's technical performance as a benchmark for effectiveness. They report the speed with which a website loads across the world (e.g., Keynote) or IT response time (e.g., Cymphony). Other web analytics companies (e.g., Comscore, Nielsen) measure a website's audience for advertising purposes, i.e., how many visitors, who they are, and consumer demographics. Additionally, some companies (e.g., WebTrends) also measure user movements on a particular website, i.e. number of visitors, number of pages seen, and how long they visited each page. Again, while this information is somewhat helpful in evaluating a website's effectiveness, it paints an incomplete picture of what drives the website's overall revenue.
A number of web analytic companies also offer some level of quality measurement, but each one of these measures only capture one or two of the key drivers of revenue and do not paint a comprehensive picture of a website's profitability, especially in light of an “industry standard” that may exist across industry websites.
For example, “quality of user experience” may be a useful tool to measure the general effectiveness of the website itself as regards the user, but this measure falls short if it ignores other critical drivers of revenue. Thus, even if 100,000 users have a high quality “user experience”, that positive experience may be generating some revenue, but how well is the website set up to attract the other 5 million potential users it is not reaching? The present users may have a “good experience”, but what if most of them log off before they actually make a purchase? The 100,000 may have a “great experience” and even make a purchase, but what if the website never asks for e-mail addresses? If the company does not secure the customer e-mail addresses, the company cannot develop long-term relationships with these customer users and cannot attempt to sell them products a second time.
Finally, many of the existing web analytics tools produce complex, and often esoteric data sets and results that can be difficult for the typical corporate executive to understand. There is a need for a tool that can also simplify the web analytics results, and present them in more “real world” terms, so that company executives (who ultimately make decisions regarding budgeting for their companies' website) can better understand how to invest their resources and efforts.
In summary, while there are many web analytic tools and services available, there exists no simple (single source solution) universal analytical scoring tool that allows companies to get a topline, easy to understand score of a website's OVERALL ability and capacity to generate revenue. Current solutions also do not provide specific separate scores that identify which of the many drivers of e-commerce the website excels in, and which need improvement.